Trump singles out Texas and Florida for help with coronavirus response

[demmiblue]

Source: CNN

(CNN)President Donald Trump agreed to continue paying for the full cost of National Guard troops deployed to help with the coronavirus response in just two states -- Texas and Florida -- after their Republican governors appealed directly to him.

Other states will now have to pay a quarter of the cost of National Guard deployments in their states, despite their governors also requesting the federal government continue to foot the entire bill. A White House official said Trump made an exception for Texas and Florida because their governors -- who enjoy close relationships with Trump -- made "special, direct cases to the President."

The official said Trump "is open to speaking with any governor from any state."

While Texas and Florida both have a large number of coronavirus cases -- more than 466,000 and 502,000, respectively -- other states with large numbers of cases, like California and Arizona, will only see three-quarters of the costs covered by the federal government.

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/06/politics/trump-national-guard-coronavirus-texas-florida/index.html

[machoneman]

1. Lawsuits in 3-2-1. Can't treat one state differently here than the other 48. But....

..by the time this works its way through the courts, Trump will be toast!

[CountAllVotes]

2. You mean the hospitals in TX aren't only 1/2 full?

Gee I was either lied to or something is amiss in TX.

I was told this by a woman I know that lives near Houston.

Her dump loving son in a nurse at the local hospital and she claims that the hospitals are not full and that this whole thing about all of these cases in TX are FAKE NEWS!

I've had enough of this B.S. because, IT IS WHAT IT IS!

[uponit7771]

6. +1, there's a report on MSNBC this morning where a hospital in TX has to send patients out of state

[Igel]

9. Odd statement.

https://www.tmc.edu/coronavirus-updates/overview-of-tmc-icu-bed-capacity-and-occupancy/ gives you Houston's TMC's numbers for ICU beds. Currently (this can change in the next 10 minutes) about 1360 ICU beds occupied, 540 from COVID, with 870 planned ICU beds on tap.

That's Houston. We had a huge hospitalization rate. But the Texas Medical Center is frigging huger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Medical_Center

Now, if you go to McAllen down on the border you'd find that they've taken over the convention center as an emergency COVID ward and hospitals have no more room. One hospital in San Antonio was also seriously slammed.

But those two places are a 6+ hour drive. I live near Houston. I visited McAllen for spring break. And San Antonio is about as far away from Houston as NYC is from Baltimore.

[raccoon]

3. That should be grounds for impeachment and removal.

But the idiot Republican congresspeople wouldn’t remove him if he dropped an atomic bomb on a blue city.

[SergeStorms]

8. Because they're so scared of him.

As reported in another post this morning. They'd be out of work if they stood up to him. Yeah, right. There's safety in numbers, or so they say. If enough of these lily-livered republican congress critters got together they could bring Trump down to his knees, but I guess that fact somehow escaped them. They don't want to confess that they agree with everything Trump has been doing.

[dalton99a]

10. +1

[George II]

4. Let's hope we can hold on for three or four more months before this nightmare ends.

[PSPS]

5. "Do me a favor, though"

[modrepub]

7. "Blue" States Better Wise Up

They've been financially supporting "Red" states for years. Time for tax revenue to be figured into Federal allotments; you shouldn't be able to take multiple times more than you pay in. This situation just reenforces Repub talking points about "high tax" states squandering their revenue. "High Taxes" imposed by some state/local governments are probably the result of having to offset tax revenue losses at the state and federal levels.

[Javaman]

11. just another way to buy votes in the now battle ground states. nt